New breed of big-city Republicans

A decade ago, Democrats made a concerted effort to bring rural and exurban voters back into the party’s fold. Today, Republicans are struggling with the opposite problem — how to win over voters from America’s booming cities.

National Republicans have given remarkably little thought to how to reverse their decline in urban areas, even as they have grappled with how to be more inclusive and diverse.

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But there are stirrings of a renewed effort by a handful of GOP candidates and activists to edge the party into being more competitive in America’s cities. They see their efforts as a necessity for the party’s long-term competitiveness given the rapid growth of America’s urban centers.

“Half the battle is showing up,” Patrick Mara, a GOP candidate for Washington, D.C., Council, told POLITICO, arguing that urban Republicans need to step up and run even in jurisdictions that aren’t necessarily friendly turf to the party.

The previous generation of big-city Republicans, like former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, won on law-and-order platforms of reducing crime and eliminating urban blight.

Mara, along with Joe Lhota in New York and Kevin James in Los Angeles, are among a breed of urban Republicans trying a different tack: presenting themselves as socially tolerant yet fiscally hawkish candidates with a social libertarian bent who depart in major ways with the mainstream national GOP.

Mara, Lhota, James and others aren’t culture warriors. They all oppose some aspects of the drug war. They’re largely pro-gay marriage and pro-choice — and they’ve put education and good government issues at the center of their campaigns. Another commonality: They’ve all ducked tricky questions about their relationship to the national party.

Mara cites former Rhode Island Sen. John Chafee, a pro-choice environmentalist Republican, as his political idol — in fact, he worked for Chafee when he was younger. Like many of the young urbanites he hopes to woo, he doesn’t own a car. He bought his rowhouse in a now fashionable part of Washington’s Columbia Heights neighborhood back when the area was mostly boarded-up buildings and urban blight.

Mara favors abortion rights, is pro-medical marijuana — now legal in Washington — and would “probably” back pot decriminalization. He touts his efforts lobbying Congress in 2010 to allow Washington’s gay marriage law to go into effect.

Mara, who also favors traditional GOP priorities, like lower taxes and fees, acknowledged in an interview the difficulty of running as a Republican in a city President Barack Obama carried by 84 points.